A Context-Aware Infrastructure for Supporting Applications with Pen-Based Interaction

Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the penprovide users with more flexibility and natural interaction. However,it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces becauseof the lack of support for their development. Toolkit-level support hasbeen exploited to solve this problem, but this approach makes it hardto gain platform independence, easy maintenance and easy extension. Inthis paper a context-aware infrastructure is created, called WEAVER, toprovide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applicationsand legacy GUI-based applications. WEAVER aims to support the pen as anotherstandard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse andpresent a high-level access interface to pen input. It employs application context totailor its service to different applications. By modeling theapplication context and registering the relevant action adapters,WEAVER can offer services, such as gesture recognition, continuoushandwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations, to appropriateapplications. One of the distinct features of WEAVER is thatoff-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced withpen interaction without modifying the existing code. In this paper, thearchitecture and components of WEAVER are described. In addition,examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.